I understand that the soul R&B group, The Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose, had a terrible automobile accident while touring Texas when their first Top Forty hit was near the top of the charts. I believe this was in 1971. Haven’t been able to find much detail about the accident online. Pastor Eddie Cornelius, the group’s lead singer, gave a radio interview last year revealing that the accident took place in Texas, that their vehicle had been pulled over by the state patrol and was stationary at the time of the accident and that they were autographing a copy of their hit record for the officer at the moment of impact. Are there any urban legends about this incident in Texas?

Looks like it happened the week I graduated from high school. Where I lived I could throw a rock across Clear Creek from the middle of my backyard. I didn’t hear about the accident until about a year or so later from the guy who had been junior class president during my senior year. The group had their second chart topping hit, Too Late To Turn Back Now, exactly a year after their first hit peaked in August, 1971. Pastor Eddie mentioned in the 2011 interview that the group’s second hit was composed and sung for the first time over the telephone from a hospital bed with all four limbs in traction. The record label was concerned that the accident might have finished the group so he had to demonstrate that he could still write lyrics and sing songs. Unfortunately, the group had a difficult time making enough live appearances to satisfy the clause in their contract requiring them to promote their music with concert tours. When Don Cornelius of Soul Train committed suicide a few days ago I started wondering if the soul singing family pop group was related to him. So far I’ve seen nothing to indicate they were.

I was younger, seven, and we’d moved out of the area at that time, so I don’t have a personal recollection of it. Their performance the night before had been at the Bamboo Hut in Galveston, which only closed its doors relatively recently. It was down on the beach, and I don’t recall whether it closed before it was wiped out in Hurricane Ike in 2008.

Speed limits were reduced to 80 mph on freeway flyovers to accommodate merging traffic from the right on overpass downslopes, with speed traps set to catch motorists who failed to reduce speed coming down the flyover. A Florida driver, unaware of the local custom, could easily fall foul of such speed traps. Is there a worse place to pull someone over?